contracts Blog Posts

I’m not sure when it happened, but sometime in my lifetime the family home stopped being where you chose to live to raise your family and put down roots and became an investment asset. It seems this transformation began when investment bankers on Wall Street first realized residential mortgage lending represented a potential source of huge profits.

Today, banks and savings and loans have loan origination offices or mortgage brokers spread all over the U.S. making as many home loans as possible with no intention of holding and servicing the loans they fund. The mortgage loan department funds or buys loans in cities nobody at the bank has ever even visited, let alone actually knows and understands.

Non-lender work is growing in popularity, as appraisers have grown weary of outrageous AMC demands and competing for low-ball fees. But the grass isn’t always greener on the other side: non-lender work has its cons, and AMC work has its pros. Don’t believe us? We’ve laid out some of the pros and cons of both types of appraisal work.

One of the requirements of your job as an appraiser is getting to the property to appraise it. Unless you are appraising a property within a few blocks of your own house or office, chances are that you will be driving there. Today, the costs of driving -- higher gas prices, higher insurance premiums and higher maintenance costs -- have gone through the roof.

Whether in the field or at the office, there’s much at stake every day. Yet, many of us continue to overlook the importance of professional liability insurance.

Commonly known as errors and omissions - or E&O - insurance, these policies are designed to protect you against legal recourse should a lawsuit be filed against you. However, not all policies are created equally, and premiums are continually on the rise. So what’s the story behind these additional costs?

In This Episode - Earlier this year, Fannie Mae announced the launch of its Appraiser Quality Monitoring system, or AQM. Essentially, the AQM is a government-derived type of system that monitors the quality and consistency of your appraisal reports. With this system in place, the agencies will be able to determine whether your work requires consistent, ongoing review or if you will end up on government-level “do not use” list.

In my years of appraising, I have had had to argue with many Lenders, Attorneys, and general pains in the butt. What many of us have found is that when Banks screw up, they come knocking at your door.

What we need to do as appraisers is to state the separation of Lending liability to appraisal liability. Please consider utilizing the following statements in your reports After your statements of intended users that is required in your reports.

I have been using this for years in my reports as it returns liability for poor lending decisions back on the Lender - It is...

First, it is gratifying to know you are actually reading what we write and release. We know this is true because a little over a year ago, we received very few questions about subpoenas and today, after writing a little warning piece on the now infamous FDIC subpoenas being issued to appraisers by a private law firm, we get lots of questions. In fact, we get so many we decided to put together a short follow-up piece on different kinds of subpoenas and how to handle them. These are presented in ascending order of concern with the final one being the most dangerous....